Currently I am still taller than my son. But my days are numbered I’m fairly certain.

I took this picture yesterday:

Frowny dude.

I took these ones two years ago in July:

Gosh, he’s getting tall.

In drawing class last fall we had an assignment to create a drawing using at least three figures in a narrative. We were encouraged, but not required, to use a comic strip sort of layout or at least idea for moving the story along.

So I took a few of my pictures from swim lessons last summer…

and used them to put together something of a montage of Child C at swimming.

I’m not really all that comfortable with realism, so I traced and transferred the figures onto my paper. My instructor liked the nostalgic, old picture feeling I ended up with. He preferred it without the yellowy background. Then he delved deeper into the picture to find that it seemed like a study in the ephemeral nature of youth. Described here by the interminal waiting, the preparing, poised just on on the precipice, and then, whoosh, they’re gone.

This was not what I was thinking of when I was making this piece and nearly made me cry in class. Jerk.

Anyway, I felt like these pictures of the progress of Child C as he grows taller (he can now just grab stuff out of that top cabinet!) and moves through time toward his own big splash had the same feeling of trying to capture a moment in time before it gets away from you.

I feel that there is a certain price we pay for taking a life. Of any kind. So, to me, if you are going to be a meat eater, it is more authentic to kill it yourself and pay the price yourself, then it is to transfer the cost to someone else and get your non-animal shaped meat packages delivered to you.

I think it’s very easy in this society to be completely removed from our food sources. I think many people are able to disconnect the hamburger in the store or in the restaurant from the cow in the field.

Having said that, I don’t follow my own code. I am not going to kill my own meat to eat. I get upset when birds, mice, squirrels, dart out to hit my car when I’m driving. By my own code I should, therefore, not eat meat. I do, at least, try to be mindful of it.

I married a mountain man, a warrior, a hunter. A man who can and has lived off the land completely. These days he may physically not be the mountain man he once was, but mentally he hasn’t changed much from the young man roaming the mountains of Wyoming.

So I struggle with how much hunting stuff my son gets to do. I’m sure that my husband thinks I’m just a big buzzkill on this issue. But if were only up to me, my innocent little boy could go his entire life without ever having hunted. Obviously, it is not only up to me. So things go too fast for me and too slow for them and we muddle in the middle where most of life happens.

This week we passed a milestone on our hunting journey. The Dudeling shot his first rabbit. He is so proud and I am proud for him. I am also sad. Because the rabbit died. And he’s the one who killed it.

On his path to becoming a man. He has provided food for the family table now. Because we eat what we kill. If it’s big enough to eat. So Daddy helped him dress it so we can cook him up. Speaking of which….any good rabbit recipes out there?

While I personally don’t prefer to hunt, I have always respected my husband’s right to enjoy things that I don’t, especially since I feel like he has a strong respect for the animals and isn’t only hunting trophies.

But I have to say that after last year’s hunting “adventure” as well as three separate trips back to the same location to try to retrieve our camp gear which resulted in his truck getting stuck all three times in the same non cell phone signal area thus rendering him unable to even text me that he was okay without a good hike out to a spot with a signal. I am tired of hunting and all of the accompanying drama that we have been “enjoying” of late.

Next year he hopes to go hunting with his brother. Which will ease my mind quite a bit, since we all know that we’re supposed to use the buddy system, especially out in the wilderness.

But this year…

This year, I’m pleased to say that he is (as a concession to the rest of us) going hunting with a friend and a bit more locally. Hopefully that means he will be in touch more. Of course, I won’t hold my breath.

I wish him quick success. Because the quicker we get our deer, the quicker hunting season will be over.

I’ve been a little lax about posting in my Man Up and Womanly Arts categories. To be honest, it’s hard to maintain the energy needed to be that worked up about it all the time. So I throw in the towel sometimes for a while. (Obviously it has NOTHING to do with my focus challenges. At all.) Also, I have a little wiggle room because I am raising a man-cub and while there are lots of gender and gender role issues to deal with for boys, the boxes they are put in have a little more room. However, I do sometimes come across something that really needs to be shared. This is one of those things.

Generation M for Misogyny

“Another generation of women and girls is being trained to please men, to do whatever they can to not make men unhappy, to stroke men’s egos and to know their second class status and not complain about it”

“Girls today are raised around images of idealized beauty, where airbrushed perfection informs girls of the standards of beauty in our society, and it is also no accident that the words “Hot” and “Sexy” appear on almost every cover of teen magazines aimed at girls and where makeover tips are found throughout. It is against this background of idealized beauty, and the beauty industry’s insistence that girls and young women have many imperfections that this beauty industry thrives.”